Technological advances in computing devices and networking facilitate access to a wide variety of information and services allowing access from virtually anywhere in the world. Collaboration can be an effective means by which employees of a corporate enterprise, for example, or people, in general, can communicate to exchange data and information on certain topics of interest. However, given the location and connection capabilities at any point in time, participants may want to join independent of the need to rely on server or network systems.
With the advances in storage and computing power of computing systems, users now are capable of interacting with many different data types such as images, video clips, audio data, and textual data, for example. Moreover, the users can typically communicate using several types of devices with which to connect to a session. For example, one user can participate by audio/video from a conference room, another by voice via a desktop computer, and yet another by text input using a cell phone.
Collaboration, while using such disparate media capabilities, has traditionally been addressed at the server level by consolidating media processing capabilities locally. However, this is problematic in that more resources are required to administer such systems and these systems are more difficult to scale to meet conferencing demands. Advances in operating system behavior and capabilities, for example, now obviate the need to collaborate through servers thereby requiring new and more efficient APIs for accessing these capabilities for resolving device location, providing security, and the like, in a serverless communications environment.